1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of remote desktop software and, more particularly, to bandwidth usage and latency reduction of remote desktop software based on preferred rendering of a user selected area.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the proliferation of powerful mobile computing devices, many activities such as remote administration via remote desktop software can now be performed on mobile computing devices. These activities were once the domain of workstations and desktop computers, but now are being replaced with mobile solutions, such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDA), and mobile computing devices. While these mobile devices can computationally power remote desktop solutions, often times the network bandwidth available to these mobile devices is more limited than bandwidth available to desktop/workstation counterparts. For example, currently many mobile phones can only afford a few kilobytes of network bandwidth at any one time. As a result, mobile devices often perform poorly when involved in remote desktop activities. Similarly, desktop machines accessing network deployed content through a bandwidth constrained connection, such as a weak WIFI connection or a dial-up modem, often behave poorly in a remote desktop situation.
Currently remote desktop software operates by transferring data to render the entire screen area of the remote computer. Frequently, users are only interested in a portion of the desktop screen, such as an active application window. In such situations, network bandwidth is needlessly being utilized for rendering portions of the screen with very little interest to the user. Further, a direct correlation exists between available bandwidth and user experienced latency induced by relatively low data transfer rates across a network.